A nap vacation

Warning: photos of sleeping children could make viewer/reader sleepy.

I could use one of those myself. Seriously. I could go to sleep right now and sleep for about a week. I could be crowned the Nap Queen or would it be Queen of the Nap. I like the latter better. I usually hate taking naps; they leave me feeling so groggy and gross when I wake up. I have always felt that way from naps. I do not know what I was like as a baby - good napper or bad napper or just average napper. But I do know that unless I am sick (or so terribly sleep deprived that I can not function) I wake up from naps feeling less rested and my body feels as though it is trying to climb out of sludge.

So a nap vacation would have to be a really long nap for me - like a full night’s sleep and how ever much more I wanted to catch up to feel better. I think my body may be headed toward one of these shutdowns. It is what happens to me when I get too busy, do not get enough sleep, and my body starts to force me into resting. I know we were designed for sleep. God created us to get a certain amount of sleep each twenty-four hour cycle so our bodies could reboot and be refreshed daily.

This life cycle of ours (you know, the human one, all of us) we wax and wane with the amount of sleep we need at various times of our lives. As newborn humans we typically only eat and sleep. Our bodies are growing at such a rapid rate that we need this sleep to grow big and strong. As we grow out of the newborn stage we tend to settle into a natural routine with a need for a morning nap and an afternoon nap as well. Eventually around a year (a little before to a little after) we grow into a single nap need (with a few exceptions here and there). Eventually, we outgrow the need for naps all together.

All that wordiness to say, it is obvious we need sleep.

The Spoiler

Each of my children’s sleeping habits have been different. And should not they be? They are different people. When the Eldest was a baby she began sleeping through the night at about age 6 weeks. I am talking 9:00 at night to 6:00 in the morning. Scared me to death the first morning I woke up and she had not awakened to nurse. I ran to her room and she was happily snoozing away. She kept that pattern up; it was no fluke. She was a great napper. She took a good morning nap usually from about 9:30 to 10:30 then a great afternoon nap from around 1:00 to 3:30. Eventually she was down for a solid twelve hours at night (7 to 7). She was easy.

The Hungry

Goro, on the other hand, not so much. I did not realize how spoiled I was until he came along. While he went to bed easily and took great naps also, the sleeping through the night thing. He did not master that until somewhere around nine months. He would awaken screaming one of us would go check on him and we would hear his tummy growl so loud there was no way we could ignore that. Up until he was six months of age I’d either nurse him or SmockDaddy would give him a bottle. We started giving him a cup around six months. We always had one prepared for him before we went to bed. I must say that although he would wake up like this for a cup of milk, he always went right back to bed and fell asleep. So even then it was not that bad.

The Monster

Birdie, my sweet, sweet Birdie. She was a good sleeper, too. But the nap thing? Oh. My. Stinkin’. Heck! I remember teasing my best friend (Hello, Holley!) about how I’d go over to her house and find A (her then youngest and toddling child) asleep on the couch or the floor for her nap. From the time Birdie came home from the hospital she would scream when she woke up from her naps. She woke up in the mornings fine and happy and bouncing and hopping and laughing in her bed. Happy. Rested. Ready for the day. I could put her in her bed for a nap and she would be fine with it. She’d have one book or toy and she’d put herself to sleep and have a good nap. But she always woke up screaming and would spend the rest of her afternoon as the biggest grumpy butt in the world. At first we tried to console her and try to find out what was wrong. Then we just got irritated with her and ignored it. All of us. We did not ignore her, just the grumpy-butt-ness.

One day when she was about eighteen months old I intentionally kept her up from her nap because of an appointment we had that day. She stayed awake all through the appointment (it was mine not hers) and took a 20 minute power nap on the way home. She woke from the power nap and was not the least bit grumpy. That afternoon when SmockDaddy got home he asked how I got her to be so happy. I told him that she just didn’t really nap. She got a bit sleepy around six that evening, but instead of being grumpy and hard to deal with she got giddy and silly and bizzy.¹ The next day was similarly busy² for me so she did the power nap thing again. Another evening of no trauma, but instead more giddy, silly, and bizzy. Light bulb moment. Maybe she is like me about the naps. While she was a good sleeper during her naps and gave me no trouble about going down for a nap maybe her body needed to nap totally on it’s own time frame. So experimenting was necessary.

I decided for one week I would not put her in her bed at “nap time” and that I would watch her body language and play and see when she needed to nap. What she did was just crash on the couch or the floor of the den or her room and take a power nap (twenty to thirty minutes). when she awoke she was as bright eyed and bushy tailed as it was morning. I was worried a bit the first day because she did this so late in the afternoon, around 5:00-ish. I was worried that bed time would be a problem. It was not. We stuck to the same routine and all was well at night. This went on for a week without any problems of any kind with her nighttime sleeping. At this point we just decided to let her dictate when she needed to sleep. Within a few weeks of this new found sleeping system she was telling us when she wanted to go to bed if it was earlier than her regular bedtime. she would sometimes tell me she wanted to get into her crib for a real nap. Her body, her schedule. She was so great about this that we very quickly converted her crib to the toddler bed frame so she could have even more independence. It worked for her.

Note: even to this day if she is sleepy and does not want to go to sleep for fear of missing something she gets giddy and will jog in place or run around outside to wake herself up because if she were to be still for even five seconds she would fall asleep. She moves all day long - she hops and flits and bounces and jumps from one place to another (read: from one side of the room to another). She does sit still when the time dictates the need, but other wise is always moving - like a little humming bird, always in motion.

The Fear Bringer

Princerella was the one that did me in with baby sleeping habits. The fear of babies sleeping had never been a thought to me until the afternoon of her fourth week of life when I found her blue and not breathing. There was a trip to the hospital, a three day stay, and an apnea monitor that would live with us for the next nine months. She did not have sleep apnea, but severe reflux and it had settled in her throat and choked her the day I found her. Long story here and needs it’s own post.

The Clone

CowBoy’s story is almost identical to Birdie’s except that it did not take us near as long to figure it out or do something about it. He was telling us “night-night” and that he wanted to go to bed (or nap) by the time he was 15 months old. By the time he was three he had given up his nap completely with some exceptions. Sometimes he would go change for bed, grab his blanket, hug us and just put himself to bed around four or five in the afternoon. But this was no power nap, this was down for the night. He would crash and sleep through anything. Still does. He is a hard sleeper. When he does this I try to get him to eat a sandwich or something before he goes to bed, but he usually refuses, only to make up for it by eating all day long the next day. Oh wait, he does that anyway. Just like Goro, no matter where or how those two fall asleep they can be moved, clothing changed, and put in their beds and not once open their eyes or realize what was happening. They sleep like their father.

The Leach or The Vacationer

Bairno. Now there is the whole point of this post. Currently, he is taking a vacation from napping. He has decided that no matter where I put him to sleep he will NOT sleep. He does not scream these days and throw fits, he just will not sleep. He strips his bed and throws everything out of it. Then he falls asleep, hard around 5-ish and won’t wake up for hours and hours, but it does not last all night. Thus the problem. He will scream and carry on in his bed reducing everyone else in the house to tears because he wants out of his bed NOW! He will scream and cry until he throws up. Fun, that moment was. Solution: he will stay on our bed even if he is wide awake. So I just go get him and put him in bed with us. Problem: he has had much sleep already and his body does not need to go back to sleep. Symptom: he spends the next hour or two flopping on me and rolling back and forth between SmockDaddy and me. The other night I was about to lose my temper with him, SmockDaddy got up with him and stood next to the bed as Bairno immediately began to scream, “Mama! Mama!” He thinks he must be touching me at all times. SmockDaddy very sternly told him to “stop rolling around and let Mama sleep.” Then a very sad whimpering, “Otay, Papa. Sowwy.” was heard out of that sweet widdle baby.³ He crawled back over next to me, put his head next to mine, his arm around my neck, and stayed very still, eventually falling back to sleep.

While I am ready for this phase to be over soon, I will miss my sweet boy snuggles when that day comes.

Tagged as: Features, NaBloPoMo-08